Guilt-ridden Noor has a terrible secret and longs for salvation by way of a pilgrimage to Mecca, where she believes prayers will be answered, “the spiritual and the mundane.”
Her wealthy daughter, Maryam, is distracted throughout the pilgrimage by problems at her high-tech job.
Noor’s niece Nadia, the most devout among the younger contingent of pilgrims, has resentment toward her sister, Sosan, that has long been festering.
Sosan, an artist who seems to be at a crossroads in her career, is harboring a secret that affects the entire extended family.
And Nadia’s best friend, Fatima, a Black Muslim convert, is an adoptee who hopes to find her birth mother on this trip to Saudi Arabia.
The Afghan American women have issues, and Noor believes—or so she says—that prayer, conducted properly, with ritual cleansing of body and mind beforehand, will heal this fractious family: “We need to atone for our sins,” she declares, arranging her headscarf piously. Played by the always wonderful Nora el Samahy, she’s both controlling and loving — and more spiritually conflicted than she initially appears to be.
For most of Humaira Ghilzai and Bridgette Dutta Portman’s “Pilgrimage,” a two-hour Golden Thread Productions world premiere co-presented by Z Space, though, it seems like the acrimony, the old pains and old quarrels among sisters and cousins are too ingrained to be resolved. There’s constant arguing that is quite vicious, and it continues and even gets worse when the sweaty pilgrims finally arrive at the brutally hot, crowded holy site at Mecca.
It’s hard at first to get a handle on what all the animosity is about, and the yelling and name-calling are wearying fairly early on, though the actors are impressive in their access to authentic emotional depths.
A large part of the tedium of the continual squabbling is due to the visuals and acoustics in the cavernous Z Space. The audience is seated on all four sides of what is, in Act 1, a very large square playing area; in the second act it’s modified to a round central space within the square. “The play borrows from the traditional circular walking ritual around Kaaba as part of Hajj and Umrah, the major and minor pilgrimage to holy sites in Mecca,” according to the press release.
Intriguing as such a stage picture is, extended scenes that happen to take place in distant corners of the room can feel very remote indeed, and the acoustics blur much of the dialogue. The characters are onstage for so long, each with her intense agenda, that some audience members may feel disconnected, depending on where they’re sitting. That’s unfortunate, because all five actors reach what appears, across the empty expanse of stage, to be deep and convincing emotional levels throughout. (Somehow Jeunée Simon’s Fatima seems to travel the spatial boundaries especially clearly, though.)
In some ways, the show, directed by Michelle Talgarow and designed by Mikiko Uesugi, essentially describes a type of dysfunctional family scenario that’s seen onstage often enough. And the dialogue isn’t especially fresh (“Feeling sorry for ourselves isn’t going to change anything,” says Fatima).
Still, the ways in which Islamic values affect the five American women take the drama out of the ordinary.
Golden Thread Productions and Z Space’s “Pilgrimage” continues through Nov. 9 at Z Space, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. Tickets are $30-$130 at zspace.org.